Believers without faith are those who acknowledge the need for some kind of deity and some sort of supernatural. They love this spiritual side of humanity and they insist that simply because they have rejected God does not mean they have also rejected some sort of religion to fill in the cracks of modern day life. Indeed, they find the spiritual intriguing and interesting even if they refuse to grant a God the honor of their faith. They believe in many things, some of them contradictory, and so they cannot admit to an organized religion but they insist upon being acknowledged as honestly and with heartfelt feeling upon being religious. They like the idea of Scripture but refuse to grant to Scripture its ultimate authority and claim as the Word of God that endures forever. They seek a bendable word which can be formed to fit the moment and the need. They like the idea of a holy book of wisdom but are not sure it has all that much to do with salvation. Salvation is less the redemption of the sinner than it is an accommodation to sin, at least the favorite and culturally acceptable sins of the day along with the ultimate command and goal to be true to yourself, wherever that might lead.
They are atheists, to be sure, but they do admit that religion can be important. Symbolism and all. Emotion and feeling. Ritual and ceremony. They all beg for a place without the inconvenient baggage of dogma and a God. They admit that civil religion once filled the gap even as they also posit the old civil religion as too narrow to fit the diverse character of modern society and different people. Global causes have eclipsed individual redemption but the person still matters if only because religion is only one person wide and one person deep. It is sort of the same kind of attraction some have for a monarchy. It is a good show and fills the bill for national ceremony and pride but don't take it too seriously. It is just for show. In the end the monarchs are as impotent and confused as the deities ascribed to modern folks who don't want to believe but who don't want to abandon religion entirely.
Honestly, I get the attraction. The Church has disappointed us too many times and the holiest of men have acted entirely unholy in ways that make it hard to take religion seriously enough to grant it any real faith. Which pope was it who in conversation with someone seeking to sack Rome and destroy the Church admitted that the clergy and popes had been trying to do that from the inside for years and failed so what makes this fellow think he can do it now? If only the Church were not filled with sinners I might find some consolation for my suffering soul. But it is. So faith is as much as I can give it and the only thing I can offer. My eyes are constantly drawn to the good which falls short and the evil which cannot be overcome so if I am to believe in God, religion is not enough. Faith is required and faith in a real God who cannot be reasoned out or His mystery explained away. He must be take with the paradoxes that our minds struggle to swallow. Simil justus is a fairly small one compared to the Three in One and One in Three.
I fall asleep every night wishing I had something more than faith to hold onto and every night I admit to God that it is faith alone by which I come to Him or kneel before Him. The cross assures me that I can hope for mercy but it insists upon the paradox of the innocent for the guilty, the God/man who cannot die to expire His breath and be carried to a grave. In the end I do not believe in a God but in the God who face I see in Jesus even with all the uncertain and unreasonable baggage that comes with it. I wish religious atheism were enough or religion without faith but it is even more disappointing than a God who cannot be controlled, a wild God who refuses to be tamed by man but binds Himself to the blood that cleanses us from all sin. I end up sympathetic to those who are the new religious without having a real God but I must pity them rather than joining them. The God whom creeds confess and whose voice speaks through Scripture is not simply what I must settle for but the only God worth believing in. Perhaps the answer to Christianity is not trying to add a little belief into the religion of atheism but challenging the spiritual to give up the semblance for a messy reality made clean only by the splash of baptismal water and the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the end it is only faith, the great dare to trust in what you cannot see or control but also cannot live without.
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